Like most baseball fans who initially were skeptical, I’ve come around to interleague play.

Sure, it’s a gimmick that has gone on so long we’ve forgotten it’s a gimmick—make no mistake, though, it’s still a gimmick—and it has changed the way we look at the All-Star Game, if not necessarily for the worse. (It’s fun to watch Stephen Strasburg pitch to Derek Jeter, whether they’ve faced each other before or not.)

But I still enjoy it. It’s something different, after all, and even if it gets a little bit less different every year, it’s still different.

You can mock those Toronto Blue Jays-Colorado Rockies games all you want, but that game is more interesting to me on a random July evening than a Blue Jays-Kansas City Royals game might be. Even if interleague play has become part of the usual backdrop, these teams playing each other hasn’t; it’s still novel for the New York Yankees to play the St. Louis Cardinals, or the Los Angeles Dodgers to play the Detroit Tigers, and I suspect it always will be.

But this year brings a new wrinkle that already has me shaken and confused. Now that the Houston Astros have been moved to the AL West from the NL Central—this must mean, of course, that the city of Houston itself has been somehow physical transported slightly left—there are now 15 teams in the American League and 15 teams in the National League.

That means—since you can’t exactly ask two teams to take half a week off in the name of balance and mathematics, though I’d love to see you try to run it by Buck Showalter—that in 2013, there is going to be an interleague game every day of the season. Every day!

No longer will there be weeks of the season when interleague just shows up, out of nowhere, earlier this year than last year, it seems. Now, it’s upon us from the very first day of the season. The Cincinnati Reds, long the historic host of the season’s first game (a title now deposed), will host the Los Angeles Angels. On April 1!

This means, of course, that there will also be interleague play at the end of the season. Let’s take a look at the AL Central. It’s Sept. 29, the final day of the regular season. The Cleveland Indians play the Minnesota Twins. The Royals play the Chicago White Sox. Huge intradivisional games! And division favorite Detroit plays … at Miami. I know that we’ve mostly normalized interleague play, but that’s downright strange.

This doesn’t bother me, I guess, so much as it upsets that notion that interleague play is, in fact, different anymore. This is, after all, just the first step. Once we accept that there is nothing unusual about interleague play, that it’s just another game on the schedule, it both normalizes it and makes it not matter anymore. Interleague play in the past has been a fun little fortnight of weird games. Now it’s just a regular part of the sked. It means nothing.

I’ve always been wary of baseball becoming like the NFL, NBA and NHL, in that they have both conferences (or in this case, leagues, of course) crisscrossing and playing each other all the time. It’s part of the regular schedule, no big deal. This defeats the point of interleague play.